


Or

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Gen, Hope, Life after Life AU (novel by Kate Atkinson), Minor and Major Character Deaths, Multiple Lives, Multiverse, Reincarnation, Reincarnation AU, angst with a suggestion of a happy ending, but as this is reincarnation, death is never final
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 23:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20920103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: In a universe where every change in every life's pathway creates a myriad new possibilities, where harsh realities mean a child may never live to their first birthday, or may live a long life without realising their path has gone astray, two human souls gradually work their way towards a mission accomplished.





	Or

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely based on the fantastic and thought-provoking novel "Life after Life" by Kate Atkinson. To do a full "Life after Life" AU would be a mammoth task, though, as it's a really long book, so this is more like a sketch of the possibilities the story offers.
> 
> Apologies for my Spanish, it's almost 20 years since I was speaking it regularly so I'm very rusty! Please let me know so I can correct any problems and errors.

He’s born in the year of the choke-cough epidemic, and dies like hundreds of other infants on grey, icy Fest, before he’s six months old. 

Or

He’s born in the year of the choke-cough, and he’s the only one of his family to survive it, by one of those freaks of chance too sad to ever be called miraculous. 

The job of rehoming the late Senior Engineer Andor’s infant son falls to a beleaguered Sentient Resources manager who is only too glad to hand the baby over. The newly renamed Infant no 776 (Fest) is a healthy, beautiful child with anxious dark eyes full of love, and Imperial Adoptions Ltd (motto “Where love guides you”, average charge per placement, 16,000 credits) soon finds him a family. He’s taken and renamed once again, within days. 

The baby grows up on Corulag; Gharial Barro, beloved son of Neeta and Nadamit and brother to Silvit, Indikhat and Eymat. Happy and loved, and loyal to the Empire that gave him this chance at life.

Or

The whole family lives through the epidemic; every one of them is sick, but Jeron has paid extra to make sure they have most of their shots, and the worst form passes them by while poorer families loose one member or two, even half their number, children and adults alike coughing till their lungs break down in blood and they asphyxiate in their own beds.

When Cassian is three years old his father gets a new job, on Velimine, at Phrikacor’s HQ, and the family moves away from Fest. He misses the cold, the steadiness of it, reliable like stone, and after the perpetually overcast and beautiful skies of home Velimine’s changing seasons are confusing. When winter comes and brings with it a snowfall that sends other children out rejoicing, he and his sister Sofia stare at it in disappointment.

“’S not snow!” he protests to his papa. “¡No me gusta!”

“¡No me guthta!” echoes Sofia happily; but she’s picking some up just the same and throwing it, following the other kids out to play, willing as Cassian is not to accept this snow that is so different from the true snow, the snow of home. 

It should be grey and soft, a comforting blanket, but it flies from her hand, scrunched into a ball, into a weapon, crisp and sparkling white. 

White isn’t ugly in itself, Cassian reasons; he knows his white festival clothes are special, and his parents’ white kerchiefs for dancing. But white snow? – it’s too bright, too clean, it looks fake, and as unnatural as seeing the best guest sheets thrown out on the ground to be trampled.

“No me gusta,” he repeats under his breath, and then he goes out anyway, so as not to worry Mama and Papa. He plays with the snow and studies it, and the discovery of its intricate structures and symmetries cheers him up. These snowflakes are like tiny crystals, always six-pointed, always different. All the stars in the galaxy are here in his hand, bright shining. 

At home in the soft Festan snow the crystals never ever showed themselves, and he never knew snowflakes had a structure at all till now.

He counts them and draws them, and tessellates the drawings, playing with the wonderful mathematics of pattern.

Velimine is safe, and clean, and Papa’s new job pays enough for them to have a good life. There’s no lung disease here, neither chronic or epidemic, and no environmental degradation, and the creeping militarisation that is slowly turning the company’s mining worlds in something close to forced-work-camps passes by HQ entirely. Jeron is politically active just the same, attending meetings, signing petitions and delivering voting pamphlets. He’s a Union Rep, but he turns down the offer of a sponsored place on the deputation to a big anti-war demonstration on Carida, because it’s the same day as Cassian’s birthday. A week later, Cassian sees him and Mama wringing their hands as they watch the holo-news, and learns that three of Papa’s colleagues were killed when the demonstration turned violent and government troops fired on the crowd.

But there’s nothing to be done about it now, except be grateful that it wasn’t Papa. He’s six years old and he knows it’s not right that someone should have to be glad his father didn’t get shot by soldiers, when no-one’s father should ever be shot in the first place; but he loves Jeron devotedly and wants never to lose him or leave him, and that simple certainty makes sense to him against the confusion and complications of the bigger political picture.

He loves his sister too, of course he does; but she’s only four and sometimes she can be very irritating. When his hide-and-seek game with Lonzo and Gerri and Javier is interrupted by her demand to join in yet again, he knows he can’t say No to her, because she’s little and doesn’t know any better; but he determines to hide where she can never find him. 

The door of the disused chemical store clicks shut behind him with satisfying finality.

It cuts off both air and sound. When Cassian is found, he’s unconscious from lack of oxygen; he lives, but is never again the quick-witted child with the talent for maths and the strangely mature conscience. Sofia goes to school, and then to college and in time, radicalised by her student life, to the Rebellion. Her big brother stays at home with Mama and Papa, safe at the heart of Imperial space.

**

He lives, he dies, and so do his family, his people, his world. The boy who is mostly called Cassian grows to manhood, on Fest, on Velimine, on Corulag; or, on Alderaan, on Dantooine, on a series of ships and hidden bases. He stays at home and is cared-for by the family who have to put him first now, no matter the prompting of their own conscience. Or, he becomes a mathematician; or a statistician, or an engineer. Becomes a smuggler. A spy, an assassin, a secret agent. 

Becomes a casualty of a collapsed mine shaft, a refinery accident, or an Imperial clampdown; or the bite of his own lullaby pill.

Becomes a spy, and kills a man on Eadu; and is in turn killed, with a bitter acceptance in his heart, by the man’s daughter.

**

He becomes a spy and is sent to Jedha to collect a defector with a message from Galen Erso. The Alliance has cut all ties with the Partisans over a decade earlier, and have no connections to give them a way in, or any hope their leader will listen, but Cassian goes anyway, because he must.

Saw Gerrera, a man of small kindness and less trust, imprisons the soft-spoken spy. Interrogates him with all his usual methods. His adopted daughter watches, and flinches, and curses herself for her pointless sudden weakness.

Cassian regains consciousness just as the earth begins to tremble, and he’s trembling so much himself, all his mind crushed like so much wet grain by the tentacles of Bor Gullet, that at first he can’t work out what part of this tremor is his own wrecked self shaking and what is the world at large.

He has a brief impression of a young man watching him from the shadows; of exhausted, blank eyes and a face that looks as shattered as his own spilled pool of thoughts. He remembers there was a girl, earlier, watching just like that, with eyes of confused pain and anger. The stranger in the cell flinches and so does he, just as she did, as first dust and then particles of rock begin to rain down on them. Out of these rags of memory a series of distinct thoughts rise, crumbling like the roof but momentarily coherent: That he and Bodhi and Jyn are almost echoes of one another; that he has no idea why he thinks the others’ names are Bodhi and Jyn; and that he has failed.

**

In a prison, on a bitter cold midwinter night, a child is born, and dies within the hour. The guards have to prise the body from her mother’s bloodstained hands. Lyra Erso cries herself to madness, that night and a hundred others, before finally being freed to rejoin her husband. By then she is too much of a wreck to care that his work is making monsters.

Or

In a prison on a bitter winter night, a child is born, and lives a week. Long enough for her mother and a hundred other captives to cuddle her and play with her, to love her, and to be devastated by her death. She had beautiful eyes, they remember, and a smile so innocent, so full of hope and life, it broke your heart.

She lives long enough to wear the onesies her mother had knitted out of an unravelled work smock. Long enough to soil diapers, long enough to cry and laugh at the narrow, brutal world of the women’s prison. Long enough to be named. Jyn Erso is buried without a marker in the damp grey soil of Vallt.

Her mother is freed a month later, only to see she has passed into another sort of prison, alongside her husband; trapped in the keeping of Orson Krennic.

She poisons Krennic with sun-whisky and goes back to Vallt, to die on the same world as her daughter. Her husband is taken to work for Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin.

He has no reason anymore to see the wrongs that underlie the world, no reason to care what his work may one day do. He simply works. And works. 

Or

The child is born, but Lyra Erso bleeds, and bleeds. She’s silent; she’s learned, as they all do here on Vallt, never to draw attention to herself. She holds her daughter with weakening hands, watching over her until her own eyes close, and her lips grow ashen. Too late her cellmate gathers the steely courage needed to call for help.

The guard who responds is the greedy, sentimental one. Officer Banta Pilar.

Officer Pilar bends over the dying woman, her own eyes wide with emotion. This much, at least, she thinks, she can allow herself, as Lyra presses her last bribe on her, a crystal pendant she’s kept hidden who-knows where, and whispers a plea, and a name.

“I’ll see she’s safe,” she tells Lyra. It’s like a scene out of one of her favourite holo-novelas. “I promise,” she adds, swept away on that thought. “Cross my heart with stars.” Lyra’s eyes widen for a moment, a gratifying image of relief, before they close again, too weak to stay alive.

Banta Pilar mishears the single syllable name, and it’s as Jyng Lyra-Erso that the baby is put up, a few days later, for placement through Imperial Adoptions Ltd.

The system is impersonal, and efficient. Long before Galen Erso learns, on being freed from his own imprisonment, that his wife and infant both died on Vallt, little Jyng has been picked by a childless couple, Luis and Ladora Rivira, and has travelled thousands of lightyears to a new home in Aldera City. She grows up healthy and happy in the shadow of Appenza Peak, and wants for nothing while she lives. But like the life of her city, her world itself, her time there is short.

**

“Officer Pilar!” Prisoner 75220 (Olbfy, Shisee) yells through the bars, and the plump human turns irritably.

“What? The_ hells_?”

Shisee’s cellmate is prone, groaning, clutching her abdomen.

“Help!! She’s gone into labour!” Shisee is very young, and not smart, and clearly terrified; enough to draw attention, loudly and repeatedly, in this place where being unnoticed is every resident’s best hope of safety. “Please,” she begs “get the medic!”

Prisoner 75219 (Erso, Lyra) is giving birth, the natural way, prematurely. The medical wing has her booked in for a C-section, standard procedure, in two weeks’ time. Banta Pilar swears at her, and at the wild-eyed Shisee. She can’t afford to get sentimental about this, not when it’s disrupting schedules and causing mess and noise. Officers whose shifts disrupt schedule tend not to make their quarterly bonus.

But the noise could be worse; it’s mainly the panicked Shisee, who quiets when the order to do so is barked at her for a second time. Erso may be grunting with effort on each breath, but she barely ever cries out. Her dark hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat but she’s trying her best and something, whether self-discipline or fear or sheer fuck-you attitude, is keeping her voice down. She grimaces, pants, the pain rolling over her in clearly visible waves.

Pilar curses and comms the med-wing, and then stays. The damage is done; a prisoner dead in childbirth on her shift will look worse on her record than simply a prisoner causing a disruption. She curses again, and again, over and over in reflexive angry shock as she helps Prisoner 75219 deliver her first-born child. Erso bleeds, and bleeds, but the medic who arrives too late to assist with the ill-timed birth is at least able to stitch her up and dose her with an anti-haemorrhagic.

Her first major life risk safely cleared, baby Jyn sleeps sound in her Mama’s arms.

**

She lives, or dies; mother and child, child and mother, they live or they die, apart, together. Life and death and life, a hundred paths and a thousand more. A hundred ways for a new-born to die, for a longed-for child never to take one breath of air; or to breathe for a ten-night and then cease for all time. A hundred ways for a new mother, sick and exhausted by months of deprivation, to die giving birth or in the days after. A hundred ways more for that mother to have to give up her baby; willingly or unwillingly, Imperial Adoptions Ltd will not care. Average charge per placement, 16,000 credits.

**

They’ve been hiding, Jyn knows that, even though no-one has ever explained it to her in so many words. Ever since the day they carried her very, very quietly out of the apartment, in the very early morning. Mama and Papa have been make-believe playing, as if it were a game, for a whole year, and every week the games have included hiding and waiting and making sure no-one can find you. 

But Mama hanging her crystal round Jyn’s neck first with a murmur of “here, darling, this is for you to wear today, for safekeeping”, is a thing she has never done before. 

The moment the cool stone touches Jyn’s skin she knows it won’t keep her safe, no matter how much Mama believes it; that isn’t what it’s for.

They’ve been hiding ever since that cold morning on Coruscant, so perhaps Mama and Papa know it too. They say they’re safe, but they plan and prepare, and their string of games that were all about hiding have gone ever further, ever deeper. Only Mama never gives Jyn her necklace _for safekeeping_, not when the game begins and not when they come home after. Never. How can she have imagined it, how can she feel as though it’s a memory? How can she feel in her bones that she know what those words are going to mean?

So when the day of the ‘troopers in black arrives, and Papa sends the two of them running for the hills, to play-out one of their games alone in the cave; when Mama stops and clasps her necklace round Jyn’s throat and says the words she’s never heard before, that are so horribly familiar, she tries to take it off again. “No, mama, it won’t do that! You have to wear it, it isn’t for me!” Her little fingers and the thin cord get tangled and she pushes, trying to tug the crystal off. Mama pushes back, there’s a fierce ring in her voice that sounds almost like anger, except that it isn’t, for Mama is never angry. But maybe she’s afraid, today in the rain with the strangers coming to her home.

“Trust the Force” she insists, and pulls her daughter into an embrace that turns her heart cold. This has never happened before. 

Jyn runs away, and then runs back, and all the time she knows, _It won’t work, it won’t work_. And, somehow also, that it never will work, no matter how many times they try.

**

By the time the child Cassian Andor is recruited to carry messages and ammo for the Festan separatists, he’s noticed countless strange moments when life did what he knew it would. He’d tried to warn his Papa not to go to Carida, and his Mama about the new epidemic of choke-cough coming. Had learned countless times the agony of having a foresight no-one else shares. Sometimes he has a sister; sometimes she dies in the choke-cough when he’s two years old, or is suffocated in an accident when he’s six. All of them go, all of them leave him, always they die, one way or another.

He’s tried to warn Mrs Geferen of the crackdown that was coming, he knows it will be in just a week or two more and she must get everyone moved out of the base in the alleys behind the market, or they would all die too (all of them but him, _guilty shameful escaping hiding running away_). But she just blinked and told him to learn what strategic analysis _was_ before he fucking tried to use it.

The Alliance officer comes the next day. Cassian knew he would. The Alliance officer came recruiting just before the crackdown started, always the same. 

He had even known the colour of the man’s eyes and hair (cold blue as a summer cloudscape, dull red like an underdone spice biscuit). He’d known the officer would be tall, thin, with tense hands and a tight mouth; and that he would carry the best blaster that Cassian had ever seen.

He only needs to think for a moment to know the man’s name. Lieutenant Davits Draven.

Cassian is twelve, but he looks younger. Draven looks older than his 36 years. He looks tired, too, weary-tired like a sick man, though he moves with the precision of absolute physical control.

Cassian steps forward quickly as the Lt and Mrs Geferen pass him in the alley. “Tenente, por favour, ¿un momento?” and when Draven pauses and nods to him, he takes a breath and essays his fairly basic Basic. “Please, to recruit me? I can do good missions for you.”

“I’m sure your commanding officer can use you for good missions,” says the Lt; and repeats it after a moment, in a reassuringly uncertain Festan.

Mrs Geferen hushes Cassian, with a little frown between her brows. Guilt washes over him at the realisation that he won’t see that look on her face for much longer. The crux is very near, the place where their stories diverge. But she just wants to get on with her meeting, to learn whether there’s any point in aligning her rough-and-ready gang of fighters, which she determinedly calls her cell, to the nascent Alliance to Restore the Republic. She wants to look to the future. It’s only Cassian who knows she doesn’t have one.

He tries again. “Tenente, por favour. Lo quiero mucho. Muchísimo. I am going to – will – be good Alliance material.”

“You want to leave me?” Mrs Geferen sounds genuinely hurt. “Leave the cell? Leave Annio, your friends?”

“¡No! Pero - quiero hacer algo mas.” The words bite his mouth, guilt acid as verjuice. But he’s tried to warn her and she didn’t listen; and he has this weird, weird feeling that he’s tried that before, too. Never to any avail. Mrs Geferen always dies. She was always going to.

Cassian wants to live.

When the troopers come surging into the lanes around the little cell’s HQ, to shoot and stamp his friends into the bloody slush, and kill every last reason he might have had to stay on Fest, he’s already on board Lt Draven’s ship at Stone Port. He doesn’t cry when the Lt brings him the news. He’s already cried, and done crying, while he waited alone to be told everyone was dead.

Cassian knows how it is that he knows all these things. The Force, in some way he can’t make sense of, is with him. Sooner or later, someone has to listen to him. That has to be it. The Force has chosen him to tell people what will happen, and someday it will be useful to someone. Else why would he have been given this at all? He’s no Jedi; he’s a fine shot, but no more than a middling hand-to-hand fighter. No special warrior powers. He just knows things.

It has to be useful someday.

**

He goes to Dantooine; or, to Alderaan, or to Yavin 4. To a small forward base at the edge of Hutt space. To a ship in deep space, a home that is never in the same place longer than a day. He trains. He learns. He becomes, one way or another, every time, himself.

The certainty of his purpose breaks his heart, because Cassian knows he is just a tool of fate. He is a weapon in the hands of the Force, and that is the only reason he’s alive. No family, no friends, no lovers, only his foreknowledge, and the next mission.

**

In the dark, in the wet angry space of the cargo hold, she says to him “You can’t talk your way out of this” and he snarls back “I don’t have to” and turns away. She’s going to knife him, as she always has, and he doesn’t want to look at her white, shocked face and the hate in her eyes as she strikes the blow. He’s stared her in the eyes as she kills him before. Let her fall on him from behind this time; as he did on poor helpless Tivik, a week ago. He’ll find out if it helps to have your back turned. Maybe it will be easier if he can pretend he doesn’t know the blade is coming. 

But the blow doesn’t come at all, and bewildered and angry Cassian climbs onto the flight deck and leaves his random crewmates in the darkness.

**

A few days later, he’s in her arms.

He’s as surprised as she is, as Jyn Erso puts his arm over her shoulder and heaves him towards the turbolift door, away from the open gantry where unbelievably they have just finished their mission.

Finished, and won. She sent the data file, he killed the man in white. They did it.

Her body is very warm against his side. He’s probably too smashed-up to live very long, he thinks regretfully. Even if rescue is forthcoming, which he doubts. But just the same, a small secret smile creeps onto Cassian’s face, as this angry, heroic, unstoppable woman, who he knows so much more than he rightly should, helps him stagger towards the hope of safety.

“Do you think anyone’s listening?” he asks. There’s very little left to him but wonderment now (they made it, they sent the plans, they did it) but he wants with a ridiculously strong desire to know that Jyn Erso lives in hope now, and not in despair. That her last minutes of life will be passed in that idea, that future.

“I do,” she says. Calm, yes, and certain. More than hope there, Cassian thinks, and is puzzled for a moment; and then has a strange, insane new hope of his own. She speaks as if she knows.

“Somebody’s out there,” Jyn says with the conviction of real knowledge. _Or foreknowledge_.

She’s smiling.

As the elevator arrives he leans into her, feeling half the bones in his ribcage jar against their own broken ends, and tells her quietly “Good. So many times we didn’t make it.”

The look on her face as they descend, when they have no more words, only one another’s eyes and a last few minutes of life to share; it breaks his heart. But it tells him the simple truth. She knows. Like him, she’s been a tool in the hands of the Force, and has known it, and lived around the dislocating confusion of that knowledge. Like him. 

She knows they’re going to die now. Just as he does. Because they have both seen it before. But this time, at least, with the mission complete. No more gasping despair as the blast wave cuts them off unfinished. They did it, _they did it_.

He’s struggling with the enormity of this, and the realisation that there are only a few minutes left to tell her. Most of those precious minutes pass before he grapples together enough words out of his pain. It’s only on the sand, in her arms, and into her ear, with his eyes closed on death because against all odds now at the very last _sweet Force_ he _wants to live_; it’s only having told her already “Your father would be proud of you, Jyn” that he knows what else to say. Finally. “Next time, let’s make him even more proud, and live.”

She rears back, astonishment in her eyes, tears streaming sparkling in the brilliant hot light. “Next time?”

Her dusty grimy hand comes up, and touches his cheek. And they are like that, looking into one another’s eyes, smiling, hoping, as the blast takes them.

**

He’s born amid the grey snow and the cold, into a loving and political family. She’s born in prison, to a mother desperate and burning for freedom, a father whose work is a monster he will once again seek to escape. They live, they grow, they thrive; and they know what they live for.


End file.
